As there are many examples of kings and emperors converted to the Christian religion, so there is a notable example of one relapsing to the condition of an apostate. Julian the Emperor was brought up as a Christian, and had the repute even of a zealous Christian till he attained the age of twenty, when he took a grudge against the Christians, and resolved to restore, if possible, the worship of the gods as it used to be before the Christian era. He was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and studied with the Pagan philosophers. He composed an elaborate work against the Christians. To spite the Christians he resolved to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem; but earthquakes, whirlwinds, or fiery eruptions destroyed these attempts. He prohibited the Christians from teaching rhetoric and grammar, and excluded them from offices of trust, ordered the Christian temples to be demolished and the Pagan temples to be rebuilt, and showed an irrepressible dislike to the progress of Christianity. Julian admitted that neither fire nor the sword could change the faith of mankind. He therefore prohibited the putting to death of the Galileans, as he called the Christians. He looked on them as wild, savage, and intractable brutes, or at least poor, blind, misguided creatures, who needed only be left to punish themselves. The Pagans of Antioch received him with rapture; but on entering the temple of Apollo, where he expected to find a magnificent procession, he found only a solitary priest, and a single goose for sacrifice, at the very sight of which parsimonious neglect he was greatly incensed. While he was busy urging on the restoration of Apollo’s temple, it took fire, and this the Christians viewed as a judgment; while Julian, on the other hand, attributed it to their malice. He retaliated on the cathedral at Antioch by despoiling it of the sacred vessels. Julian died in battle after two years’ enjoyment of the throne, and it was said his last words were, “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” But the most trustworthy accounts state that he died in 363 without remorse, as he had lived without guilt, and delivered an impressive address to his friends, submitting with dignity to the stroke of fate.
HOW JULIAN THE APOSTATE DIED OF WORMS (A.D. 363).
Sozomen relates that Julian, when governor of Egypt, put the presbyter, Theodoret of Antioch, the custodian of the sacred ornaments of the church, to cruel tortures, and then caused him to be slain. Julian then proceeded to the sacrilege of the sacred vases, which he flung upon the ground and sat upon, at the same time uttering incredible blasphemies against Christ; but his impious course was suddenly arrested, for certain parts of his body were turned into corruption, and generated enormous quantities of worms. The physicians confessed that the disease was beyond the reach of their art; but from fear and reverence towards the Emperor, they tried all the resources of medicine. They procured the most costly and the fattest birds, and applied them to the corrupted part, in hope that the worms might be thereby attracted to the surface. But this was of no effect; for, in proportion as some of the worms were thus drawn out, others were generated in the flesh, by which he was ceaselessly devoured, until they put an end to his life. Many believed that this disease was an infliction of Divine wrath visited upon him in consequence of his impiety, and this supposition appears the more probable from the fact that the treasurer of the Emperor, and others of the chief officers of the Court who had persecuted the Church, died in an extraordinary and dreadful manner, as if Divine wrath had been visited upon them.
THEOLOGICAL DISPUTES THE TALK OF THE DAY.
When the Arians and Athanasians, early in the fourth century, were in the height of their controversy about the mysteries of the Trinity, the public also took sides, and things beyond all human comprehension became the fashionable topic of conversation at Court. The dispute spread to the people of high rank, and then pervaded the classes below. Socrates said that a war of dialectics was carried on in every family. Gregory of Nyssa in one of his orations thus graphically described the state of public excitement: “Every corner and nook of the city is full of men who discuss incomprehensible subjects—the streets, the markets, the people who sell old clothes, those who sit at the tables of the money-changers, those who deal in provisions. Ask a man how many pence it comes to, he gives you a specimen of dogmatising on generated and ungenerated beings. Inquire the price of bread, you are answered, ‘The Father is greater than the Son, and the Son subordinate to the Father.’ Ask if the bath is ready, and you are answered, ‘The Son of God was created from nothing.’”
THE GREAT CONTROVERSY ABOUT THE TRINITY.
The controversy between the Arians and the Athanasians exercised the leaders of the Church from the time of Constantine to the Second Ecumenic Council in 381. All the great and commanding minds of the age were with the Trinitarians, each condemning the Arian heresy in his own peculiar way. One leader was Ephraim, the Syrian monk, who wept night and day for the sins of mankind and for his own, and who poured forth verse and prose in defence of orthodoxy. It was said his very writings wept, even his panegyrics and festival homilies flowed with tears. His psalms and hymns, however, animated his monkish companions, and were the occupation and delight of all the earnest believers, and all his thoughts and emotions were rigidly Trinitarian. St. Basil the monk, whose boast it was to be “without wife, without property, without flesh, almost without blood,” was equally zealous for the Trinity, and as its champion he was made Archbishop of Cæsarea. St. Gregory of Nazianzen was equally zealous and eloquent in the same cause; and even the Arian monks and virgins were excited to tumults and bloodshed by his exasperating popularity. Chrysostom in the same cause offended the Empress, who was inclined to the Arians. He was banished; but the Empress, on seeing the commotion caused by an earthquake, was afraid, and he was recalled amid the enthusiasm of the whole inhabitants, who went forth to welcome his return. His renewed insults led the Emperor to send his military officers to seize Chrysostom at the altar during the celebration of the Sacrament, and he was carried off. The same night the church took fire, for which his followers were blamed, and he never returned from exile. The cause of the Trinitarians triumphed at last and became the settled faith.
ATHANASIUS ATTACKED IN HIS OWN CHURCH.
Athanasius, the great champion of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, who died in 373, escaped many imminent dangers in his career. When Syrianus, Duke of Egypt, at the head of five thousand soldiers attacked Alexandria in 356, the Archbishop Athanasius was with his clergy and people engaged in their nocturnal devotions. The troops with horrid imprecations battered in the door and interrupted the service; but the archbishop, seated on his throne and expecting the approach of death, merely desired the trembling congregation to chant one of the Psalms of David which celebrates the triumph of the God of Israel over the haughty and impious tyrant of Egypt. When the door was burst in, a cloud of arrows was discharged, and the soldiers with drawn swords rushed forward, their armour gleaming under the lights round the altar. Athanasius refused the importunate prayers of the monks and presbyters who urged him to escape, and insisted on keeping his seat till he had dismissed in safety the last of the congregation. The darkness and tumult of the night favoured his own retreat, though he was thrown down in the crowd and was eagerly searched for by the soldiers, who had been instructed by their Arian guides that the head of Athanasius would be a most acceptable present to the Emperor Constantius, who was zealous for the Arian faction. It was on this occasion that Athanasius was lost sight of for six years, making hairbreadth escapes during all that period.
ATHANASIUS CONCEALED BY A HOLY VIRGIN.